Quote Originally Posted by Blackrose87 View Post
What time period are you talking about here?
To be specific, from the very beginning of the 18th century, after the publication of Archaeologia Britannica: an Account of the Languages, Histories and Customs of Great Britain, from Travels through Wales, Cornwall, Bas-Bretagne, Ireland and Scotland by the aforementioned Edward Lhuyd .

This book put forward the hypothesis that the peoples of Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales were descendents of either French/Swiss Gauls or Iberians, (modern day Spain/Portugal). Lhuyd came to this conclusion through the study of language. DNA has proved his Spain/Portugal theory to be partially correct, the original pre-Celtic Irish and the Portugese do share DNA, but it seems likely that this comes from an older central European culture that was pushed to the fringes by the expanding European population.
From Lhuyds book the the peoples of Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales became known increasingly as Celts. There is absolutely no record whatsoever of these people's being known as Celts before Lhuyd. Lhuyd's book sparked an interest that led to the publication of other writings such as William Stukely's, where he wrote about "Ancient Britons" constructing the "Temples of the Ancient Celts" such as Stonehenge. He also wrote very fancifully about Celtic Druids. It was all hogwash, of course, but very popular.
On the back of this crest of popularity, James Macpherson published his "discovered" poems of Ossian in the 1760's. Ironically it was Irish scholars such as Charles O'Conor that first realised that these were not old Celtic legends, but forgeries. Even more ironically O'Conor was ignored and Ossian was massively popular in Ireland, with cries that the work was in fact ancient Irish, not Scottish, in origin.
Interest in Ireland reached a peak after the Emancipation Act of 1829. By the late 1800's the term "Celtic" was probably thought of as being more Irish than anywhere else and this was to continue into the 1920's, thanks to the Irish Literary Renaissance, also known as the Celtic Twilight movement. The Celtic Congress was formed in 1902, (I think), on the back of the surge of interest in the Celtic Twilight. As you say, very recent, but dealing with a theme that keeps re-occuring through this thread;
The invention of a new tradition to please contemporary mindset or fashion at the expense of the discarding of the old, while at the same time presenting the new tradition as the old one.